Privacy On The Ground

There’s no shortage of principles and policies for governing AI from governments and NGOs around the world. But how do they put those principles and policies into practice? It’s that practical side of AI governance that has been a key focus of our work at World Privacy Forum for more than two years. 

Rather than look only at government policies, in early 2023 we went layers deeper, lookin...

Emotion recognition is baked into all sorts of software and systems many of us use or experience every day, from video call systems measuring the “mood” at a work meeting, to systems used to gauge distraction at school, or impairment or anger of drivers inside their cars. Despite its increasing proliferation, emotion recognition systems and the data use embedded in them create significant privacy impacts. 

Wha...

In this episode of World Privacy Forum’s Privacy on the Ground, Māori language expert and educator Te Mihinga Komene shares positive and problematic experiences working with tech companies to help build and correct Māori language translation and learning systems. Komene also discusses extractive data collection practices in AI, and why she hopes her scholarly research will help ensure the Māori language flourishes in the generative...

There are often disconnects between data protection policy and actual practice on the ground, especially when policy established on a regional or international level is intended to meet the needs of local communities. Eric Hardy is no stranger to this reality. In his role at the Labriola National American Indian Data Center, an Indigenous library at Arizona State University, Hardy is in the thick of it, working...

Turning what Alex Soto refers to as sometimes “lofty, grand” theoretical Indigenous Data Sovereignty principles and protocols into practice can be mundane, even tedious. It could require combing through hundreds of years-worth of paper documents, photos, oral histories of sensitive cultural knowledge in various formats, and other materials. It requires dedicated investments in time and money, and it requires on...

Amy Juan sometimes tells a story about a little bean that grows on the Tohono O’odham Nation’s San Xavier Co-op Farm called the Tepary bean. Juan is the admin manager of that farm, which is close to Tucson, Arizona. And, through her work with the International Indian Treaty Council, an indigenous peoples human rights organization, Juan has traveled the world as a knowledge holder in food and seed sovereignty for the southwest and d...

Dr Krystal Tsosie made what she calls a “hail mary” pass when she and colleagues pushed the genomic science research community to recognize that collection of genomic information from Indigenous peoples may not have offered much benefit to the Indigenous groups who contributed DNA -- and instead perpetuated stereotypes and other harms. Today, Dr. Tsosie is doing groundbreaking work in the field of indigenous ge...

Every day it seems as though another little part of our lives is reflected in data. From the way we sleep to the way we order food, get a medical diagnoses, get a job -- even how our governments operate.  

These interactions, decisions, and automations generate new data, combine it with existing data, share it, analyze it, and compute it. It all means that our earlier understandings of privacy and how to protect it have lost releva...